Looking at the Web with Internet Explorer 6, one last time

A gallery of half-rendered CSS, broken images, and shattered dreams.

After twelve-and-a-half years, the curtain fell on Windows XP yesterday: the aged operating system transitioned out of extended support and into a long, dark, unsupported and unpatched twilight. Bespoke patches will still be made for those customers willing to pay enough money—mainly governments and large corporations with significant Windows XP installed bases—but for most of the world, XP is now officially a dead operating system.

Windows XP wasn't the only thing to be shuffled into unsupported purgatory yesterday, though. Also included in the group of applications to be dumped down the memory hole is the browser that everyone loves to hate: Internet Explorer 6.

For all its terribleness now, IE6 accomplished a pretty stunning set of achievements. It's the browser that definitively killed Netscape Navigator and ended the first great "Web Browser War." At its height, IE6 was the browser of choice for ninety percent of the Web's users. Its crushing market dominance also ensured that businesses used it internally as well as externally, developing ActiveX-based Web applications for it and further perpetuating Microsoft's ecosystem lock-in.

In fact, it was too dominant—after its release, the Web browser market effectively froze and stagnated for five years. It took the rise of Phoenix (later to be renamed Firebird, and then renamed again to Firefox) from the ashes of Netscape Navigator to spark another round of competition-driven innovation; the four-browser détente we have today between Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox is vastly preferable to those sad days in the mid-2000s when IE6 ruled the Web with its untabbed, exploit-riddled interface.

Most of us have long since moved on, either to one of the mainstream modern browsers or to one of the lesser-used fringe browsers like Opera (though Opera aficionados will probably want to murder me for not pointing out that the Norwegian-developed Opera browser was a viable IE alternative even back in the dark days). However, IE6 is still around—in spite of its dangerous exploitability and lack of patches from here on, it's still going to be used by some small percentage of Web users for a whole host of reasons. According to NetApplications, 4.42 percent of the browsers it has tracked so far this year have been running IE6.

Most mainstream Websites dropped support for IE6 long ago; the weirdly broken Web experienced by IE6 users only vaguely resembles the responsive and dynamic experience the rest of us get with modern browsers. Those holdout IE6 users will experience a broken Web that increasingly diverges from reality—one filled with odd images, partial CSS rendering, and crashes.

This is how the once-mighty IE6 transitions into its own unsupported twilight: in a sad spasm of page rendering errors.

Pure vintage: Windows XP SP2, with IE6 6.0.2900.2180 SP2. If you're still using this, I feel bad for you, son—I got 99 problems, but an ancient version of Internet Explorer ain't one.

Pure vintage: Windows XP SP2, with IE6 6.0.2900.2180 SP2. If you're still using this, I feel bad for you, son—I got 99 problems, but an ancient version of Internet Explorer ain't one.

Unsurprisingly, Ars Technica doesn't look that great under IE6—our fancy menubar and CSS-dependent layout plays havoc with the old Trident engine.

The situation doesn't really get any better if we scroll down.

News aggregator Digg is also a mess, with their grid layout falling apart spectacularly under IE6's outdated CSS interpreter.

Reddit's homepage is a little better, but still essentially unusable. Upvoting and downvoting work, but clicks on the arrows take several seconds to register.

The browser then hangs, and I had to kill the IEXPLORE process. Repeated visits yielded the same result. Slashdot really, really hates IE6 (which seems appropriate).

The NYT threw up the same error as Slashdot, but IE6 at least didn't crash.

CNN sort of vaguely worked, though the page header rendering was pretty screwy.

Time.com was another half-formed mess.

Twitter kicked me over into its mobile layout, with a header note explaining what was going on. The mobile site in IE6 was actually pretty usable.

Unfortunately, clicking the "Learn more here" link led to this page, which was hopelessly broken.

What if you want to buy a Mac and rescue yourself from Windows XP/IE6 hell? Popping over to the Apple Store yields a warning that you can browse, but not buy.

...and you can't really browse all that effectively anyway.

You also won't have much luck watching funny viral cat videos: Youtube warns you that IE6 doesn't play well and will be unsupported "soon."

Apparently "soon" means "now," because this is all I could get Youtube to do.

Microsoft Editor Peter Bright suggested I pop over to Chinese search engine Baidu and see how it acted. IE6 still has a significant presence in developing markets (and for our purposes, China is one of those).

Other than missing glyphs, Baidu seems to work OK. It would probably work a lot better if I installed Chinese language support.

Surprisingly, Google Maps worked quite well. It defaulted to the older version, but it was actually quite responsive and functional. I could set destinations, zoom in and out, flip to satellite mode and back, and click on dropped pins.

Yahoo.com also looked and acted mostly normal.

By far the biggest surprise was how well Amazon.com functioned. I didn't go through with actually buying anything, but I was able to browse around and look at products without any problems.

Another shot of Amazon looking and working just fine.

Another site that looks fine is the stalwart Metafilter—unsurprising, considering that the site essentially looks exactly the same now as it did the first time I visited it in late 1999.

Microsoft's Bing.com puts up a valiant struggle and ends up displaying with only a few problems. It even has the site's signature background image display.

Microsoft's homepage doesn't fare nearly as well, though. The modern Web has taken over Microsoft.com as thoroughly as it has any other big company's site, and IE6 thoroughly mangles the layout.

But you know what Microsoft site does render without any issues? Poor old neglected MSN.com. Quick poll: has anyone ever actually visited MSN.com on purpose? I've hit its homepage untold thousands of times, but always because I was opening up a new IE install for the first time. Never once have I gone to msn.com of my own volition.

Can't say I'm surprised that Amazon worked well - their whole business revolves around making it easy for you to give them money for things. iirc, they started using one-click just to make it that much easier to give them money.

... the four-browser détente we have today between Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox is vastly preferable to those sad days in the mid-2000s when IE6 ruled the Web with its untabbed, exploit-riddled interface.

This is so true it's not even funny. At this point, all the major browsers are excellent and you really can't go wrong by choosing any of them over any other. By now it comes down to splitting hairs on already high performance metrics, or picking something out of personal preference.

You should note that if you must use IE 6 because that's all you have and can't install anything else, a great trick to get it to partially work is replace the www in www.suchandsuch.com with m as in m.suchandsuch.com Mobile browsers are often much less capable, and the mobile sites will often be a better fit for an older webbrowser.

Dear god, man. The horror will be over soon, but this reminder of that terrible period in web development has ushered in an up-welling of repressed rage, fear, and anxiety. I'll be sending Ars the bill from my therapist.

Recently retired Navy here.My ship still uses XP machines, with IE6, but they put Firefox in the official image last year, v 1.6 or so. Most people use that, and only use IE6 for sites that require their PKI certificate from their ID card to log in, something that Firefox still has a hard time doing.The ship is supposed to get new machines shortly, last I heard. No idea what OS they will be, but my guess would be 32 bit Vista.

I know about ie6, bit does ie11 still require those horrible javascript workarounds for proper html functionality.

Typically IE workarounds revolve around using conditional statements and malformed CSS that it'll either ignore or process anyway, not Javascript (which is a good thing, Javascript is soooo slow in it)

IE8 is not utter shit (unlike IE6) and it is more secure, and does not require horrible horrible version specific HTML and JS hacks. But it doesn't support CSS3 so lots of modern Web is broken in IE8 too. IE9 is the minimum version of IE you want to be on nowadays.

I shake my fist at you IE6. You cost me so many hours as a novice web coder...30 seconds to code to standards, 1 hour to understand the IE6 workaround! (I don't have a programmer's mind)

A programmer's mind would not have helped you. I know this because a) I have one and b) IE was developed entirely by steroidal, rabid ferrets who were fed a diet of hatred and cocaine. They were then let loose on random code snippets while drunken teenagers fed those snippets chosen by the ferrets into a compiler at their leisure.

Lee Hutchinson / Lee is the Senior Reviews Editor at Ars and is responsible for the product news and reviews section. He also knows stuff about enterprise storage, security, and manned space flight. Lee is based in Houston, TX.